


Betty Cooper's Wonderful Little Life

by bonbombs



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms
Genre: (last two tags referring to Betty & Sabrina), Alcohol, Battle of the Bands, Cheating, F/F, Scott Pilgrim References, Unhappy/Undesired Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25513150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonbombs/pseuds/bonbombs
Summary: There was a car stopped on the endless road in front of her. It was a long, luxurious limousine, and the woman who stepped out of the front seat absolutely screamed wealth. The driver tossed her long black hair over one shoulder and surveyed Betty. Artists could mix paint for a thousand years and never make a match for the dazzling deep brown of this woman’s judgmental eyes. Betty’s heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.“Move. You’re in my way.”[Or: A Scott Pilgrim vs. the World x Archie Comics Mashup]
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Veronica Lodge
Kudos: 14
Collections: Director's Cut Fest





	1. Lodge

**Author's Note:**

> "Volume One" snippets from a Scott Pilgrim-inspired Archie fic. Mind the tags! Like Scott Pilgrim himself, Betty is dating someone else at the start of the story and doesn't really deal with it fairly (or at all) yet. Unlike Knives Chau, though, Betty's ill-fated girlfriend Sabrina is in college and not high school.

**Friday, January 3rd**

The sky was a sparkling bright blue, last night’s snow was gently blanketing Riverdale’s familiar downtown streets, and twenty-four-year-old Betty Cooper was bored.

“Isn’t this one adorable?” Sabrina asked as her fingers toyed with a black kitten dangling from an outdoor kiosk. Enamored by love and life and Betty, she hadn’t noticed the shopkeep scowling at them. The seller raised his eyebrow archly when Sabrina dragged her fingers through another half-dozen phone charms.

Feeling deep secondhand embarrassment rise up in the form of heat scorching her cheeks, Betty looked away.

“ _So_ cute,” she said when it became apparent Sabrina was waiting for an answer. Too little, too late, maybe, but the wide smile Sabrina gave her in response was another reminder that there wasn’t much Betty could do to make her girlfriend upset.

For some reason — which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Sabrina had graduated high school the same year that Betty finished college — it made Betty’s gut twist.

“I think I’ll get this one,” Sabrina told the shopkeep, holding up the tiny black cat, the only charm Betty had complimented.

It wasn’t like she hated her girlfriend. Sabrina Spellman was cute, lanky with light blond hair in an artsy bob, even if Betty struggled to think of her as anything but vaguely cute. She was bubbly. Nice. Attentive. If Betty ever wanted to ask her to jump, Sabrina would have done her best to fly.

There was nothing wrong with Sabrina, no clear excuse for Betty to have done anything but say yes when Sabrina had first asked her out, and no real reason for her to be this tired of being together.

No reason to keep dragging this relationship out, either, except her increasingly guilty conscience.

Besides, Betty had had worse relationships. This was fine.

A group of chattering college students passed them by; then slowed down with indiscernible excitement, doubled back, and came to a stop behind Sabrina. When one of the boys tapped her on the shoulder, she almost squealed with excitement as she threw herself at her apparent friends in an attack hug. Betty stood back and let herself half-zone out. Retreat to a place in her mind where she wasn’t jaded at twenty-three and currently surrounded by giggling nineteen-year-olds. Small Talk Betty could take care of the rest.

_In her daydreams, Betty was standing in the middle of a long, dry desert road to nowhere. The sun beat down on her like a boxer trying to brutalize his foe into tapping out of the fight early._

“This is Betty, my girlfriend,” Sabrina said, her voice filled with warmth and a little bit of pride. “She’s in a real band!”

“Hi,” said Betty.

_There was a car stopped on the endless road in front of her. It was a long, luxurious limousine, and the woman who stepped out of the front seat absolutely screamed wealth. The driver tossed her long black hair over one shoulder and surveyed Betty. Artists could mix paint for a thousand years and never make a match for the dazzling deep brown of this woman’s judgmental eyes. Betty’s heart was pounding, pounding, pounding._

_“Move. You’re in my way.”_

One of Sabrina’s gaggle of friends — Harvey, Betty’s brain reminded her a second too late — tilted his head at her with a welcoming grin. “You’re with The Archies, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I play bass.”

“That’s so cool,” one of the girls cried. Betty didn’t have the first clue what her name was. “My friend said she used her fake ID to get into a bar once and you guys were there and she liked your music! Um, and the beer. But from what she can remember, you were good!”

“Thanks,” said Betty.

_“What? This is my own head. How am I in your way?”_

_The woman sighed as if a single second’s inconvenience was the worst thing to ever happen to her. Taking the diamonds dangling from her ears and the expensive art decorating her long fingernails into account, maybe it was._

_“I have a delivery to make,” she said, getting back into her car. “I don’t have time for some small-town little girl.”_

“Do you have any shows coming up?”

Before Betty could answer, Sabrina bounced on her heels and nodded so hard it made her tiny feather earrings rattle. “The Archies are in a Battle of the Bands next week,” she told her awe-struck friends. “We just came back from band practice! They’re really, really good!”

She turned her jade green eyes up at Betty through batted eyelashes (as if she was more than just a single inch taller than Sabrina) and blushed when their gazes met, looking away.

_“Wait! Can you tell me —“_

_Without hesitation, the limo revved up its engines and swerved past a startled Betty, vanishing into the endless horizon so quickly it was like the beautiful, terrifying woman had never been there at all._

_“Your name,” Betty finished to the empty air. Her legs suddenly weak, she fell to her knees and stared after the fading plume of dust until it, too, disappeared._

“I think they’ll definitely win!” Sabrina said.

“Yeah,” echoed Betty. “We just might.”

When Betty opened the door to her shared apartment, seated comfortably over a video rental store with a heater that didn’t work and a dryer that made clothes somehow more damp than before, she was overwhelmed with the smell of baked goods.

She kicked her boots off and glanced around the compact space. “You alive in here, Kevin? Or did the baking fairy finally murder you?” No response.

“If you’re dead, I’m selling your Magicians DVDs on eBay,” she called down the hall as she undid her messy blonde ponytail and retied it. There were plates upon plates of snickerdoodles, cupcakes, and eclairs littering every available surface. Whatever inspiration had seized her roommate must have been something major.

Kevin Keller came stumbling out of what passed for a bathroom in their apartment and choked out a laugh. He was tall, but fit, the half-hearted stubble and surfer haircut he’d adopted after college still apparently in style.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Being gay didn’t make him the magical arbiter of fashion or anything remotely like it, as evidenced by the way even Jughead had gagged at some of Kevin’s worst novelty T-shirts. All being gay really did was make him like men.

“If I’m dead, I can stop paying our rent,” he told her.

“Good point,” Betty said, grabbing one of the cookies off their collective pile of overdue library books. “You should definitely keep doing that and also not die.”

A single beep escaped the oven’s timer before Kevin hauled it open for what must have been the twentieth time that day. When he pulled back, tray in his hands, the room was filled with an overwhelming scent of apples and cinnamon.

“Is that a bunch of strudel?”

He nodded, grinning sheepishly over at her as he set the pastries on top of the stove. “I heard this one guy is coming to Chuck and Nancy’s party tonight. Figured I should do something instead of just sitting around on my hands.”

“Which guy?”

All she got in response was a dismissive wave of the hand and Kevin disappearing into the designated Tupperware cupboard.

Crumbs scattered onto their beat-up carpet as Betty revisited the cookie tray. This one was cinnamon, she noted, an improvement on the last time he — and three bottles of tequila — had baked cinnamon cookies that were more powder than dough. The mere memory of it made her mouth turn to ash. She takes another bite out of the good cookie instead.

“What time should we go?”

The surprise on his face was so obvious it might as well have been a neon pink forehead tattoo. “Wait, you’re coming?”

Betty looked at the army of pastries and assorted baked goods. There were enough of Kevin’s creations in the ‘living-kitchen room,’ as their chipper landlord had called it during the move-in, to launch a midsize church bake sale.

“Someone has to help you carry these,” she said. “Besides, it’s not like Chuck and Nancy’s parties are that bad. They’re both pretty cool. How bad could a bunch of their other friends be?”

Two hours and a five mile walk later, with the music pounding in her ears and the drink in her red plastic cup all too watered-down, Betty was starting to eat her words.

Chuck and Nancy Woods had moved into a three-bedroom apartment together right after high school and never looked back. People tended to flock to them the way they did any stable, fun, party-hosting couple, but Chuck and Nancy were also just nice. Between his custom birthday illustrations and her impeccable taste in personalized gifts, not a single holiday passed by without their friends feeling remembered.

Their only flaw as a couple, Betty thought to herself as she leaned back in a tiny alcove packed with family photos, was how easy-going they could be with their party guests.

From where she stood, she could see 1) a cluster of guys trying to hang their buddy over the loft’s extended balcony, 2) a girl doing a handstand next to a keg without drinking from it, and 3) Kevin offering a stack of carefully-wrapped cookies to some guy that Betty couldn’t quite make out through the throng of people.

And then she saw her.

The woman from her daydreams.

Betty almost choked on her cheap drink. In person, without the spiteful desert sunlight nearly blinding her, the colorful party bulbs made that luscious black hair glow like a halo.

A blink later, she found herself standing next to the mysterious woman. That angular profile was even more beautiful — and beautifully intimidating — up close as Betty stole nervous looks out of the corner of her eye. Whatever she was drinking from that diamond-studded thermos smelled distinctly fruity.

“Hey,” said Betty. The drumbeat in her heart had returned in full force, stronger than before.

“Hello,” her first crush in years replied.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The sound of Kevin’s deep-chested laughter echoed down from the balcony.

“Can I help you?”

Betty jerked in place and shook her head. “No. No, uh, I just thought…” Now that she was standing there, physically in front of the most gorgeous woman she’d seen in her life, dressed in a sloppy T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans, it almost felt like even mentioning their earlier encounter would be stupid. Betty scratched the back of her neck.

“Were you in my dreams?”

And so of course she’d just gone ahead and said it to the stranger anyway. Another brilliant move by Betty Cooper, the premiere genius of Riverdale.

Thankfully, her meaning — or at least a mutual understanding that Betty hadn’t hallucinated the entire meeting to begin with — was immediately clear. The woman laughed, one hand over her mouth, and shook her head. Her giggles were light and airy with just the right amount of venom to make Betty’s palms sweat.

“I sincerely apologize for not recognizing you right away,” she told Betty, crossing one arm under the other to prop up her smuggled thermos a little better. “You’re the girl from the conveniently empty hyperspace highway, are you not?”

The beer-and-water mixture burned Betty’s throat on the way down. “What’s hyperspace?”

Her crush took a sip of her own.

“I suppose you don’t have that here,” she mused. “My name is Veronica, by the way.”

The name lilted off her tongue and floated into the air between them so sweetly that Betty felt like she was being kissed by a flowery perfume.

“Betty,” she said — and then, before she lost her nerve, turned to look at Veronica straight-on. “Do you want to go on a date sometime?”

And that made Veronica really look at her, and when Veronica looked at Betty, a faint ember of something that could possibly be sparked between the two of them. It wasn’t just Betty who felt it, either. Veronica’s sculpted eyebrows raised ever-so-slightly before she smirked back.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”


	2. Doiley

**Tuesday, January 7th**

Betty’s weekend had been a dire, exhausting slog of job applications and wandering around town to find open postings, and Monday hadn’t proved much better.

By Tuesday, she’d lapsed so far into the cycle of sleep-apply-eat-repeat that it had been a surprise to see Archie Andrews at her door. The orange shock of hair in her and Kevin’s muted, tired entrance seemed to brighten the place up — but that was hardly a surprise when it came to Betty’s upbeat best friend. Archie tended to light up every room he was in.

In that moment it was almost distracting.

“Grabbed your mail on the way in, Betts,” he said as Betty shuffled down the hall toward him. “And gosh, you’re getting a lot of letters from some guy named —“

“Just leave them on the counter,” said Betty with a roll of the eyes. “Our spam mail problem has been _out of control_ this weekend. I think I keep getting mail meant for an Arthurian knight or something? ‘If you would do me the honor of a fight as pre-determined by the circumstances of your engagement,’ things like that.”

Archie chuckled and tossed the mail in a basket with three bills that Kevin still had to get around to paying. “As long as it’s not going to get in the way of the contest tonight.”

Time slowed to a painful crawl as Betty looked at him, looked at the calendar on the fridge, looked at Archie, looked at the calendar, looked at Archie again —

“Please tell me you didn’t forget.”

“Okay,” yelled Betty as she fled back down the hall to put on something more suitable for a Battle of the Bands than her _Transformers_ movie T-shirt. “I won’t tell you if you don’t ask!”

They made it to the show right on time; the band before them was only taking to the stage in the same moment that Betty and Archie stumbled in the back door, panting like they’d just run a marathon.

“You’re late,” Jughead Jones said, not even looking up from the meager refreshments table under flickering fluorescent bulbs. It had probably been a far more impressive offering of food before Jughead had been left alone with it. Honestly, she was a little bit startled there was anything left on those plastic plates at all. Something must have been on his mind.

Much like Betty, Jughead had been pulled into the orbit of Archie’s sunny personality and resourceful optimism in high school and never really left. She watched him take a bite out of an apple and cross long, gangly legs as Archie launched into a tangent about his car breaking down again.

It was comfortable. Familiar. Betty took a seat of her own and leaned back in an attempt to catch her breath for a minute.

The three of them had all come to Riverdale together, three starry-eyed kids from a tiny rural town who’d fallen in love with Riverdale’s small-time music scene and its winding streets with endless shops to explore. Their first week in college had felt like a miracle — they’d stayed up until three in the morning, laughing and play fighting and scribbling song lyrics for their brand new band.

Now, life here mostly felt like a pair of worn-out shoes she wasn’t ready to replace yet.

“What’s first up tonight?” Betty asked Archie, hauling her guitar onto her knees to unzip it from its soft case. “Are we still starting with Hot Dog Sundae?”

Jughead juggled his drumsticks and shot a disgruntled look at the only-semi-soundproof door. “Pass. That sounds too much like a Pussycats song. The audience’ll get bored.”

With a groan and a shake of the head, Betty hauled her guitar out, running her fingers along the smooth side.

“Please tell me we’re not going on after the _Pussycats_ ,” she said to Archie, whose grin was suddenly tight and unhappy. At his waist was a ring of keys he started fiddling with.

“I won’t tell you if you don’t ask,” he replied.

The scratched-up leather of the chair squeaked in protest as Betty threw herself back, groaning, and she cradled the familiar bass in her arms like it would defend her from a disappointed crowd. 

Something red that she really, really hoped was paint had been splattered across the ceiling at some point. Betty stared up at it, thinking about how — if she really _were_ the Arthurian knight that she kept getting strange, cryptic letters for — Josie McCoy and her Pussycats would inevitably be the better, more talented troupe of knights. The ones who won all the contests, got all the jobs, had all the girls falling at their feet.

“Jughead would be the court fool,” she mused aloud.

“I’m already a fool for not running off as soon as I found out what the band order tonight was,” he said with an enormous bowl of potato chips in one hand and two liters of soda in the other. “Also, _hey_! I resemble that remark!”

“You sure do resemble it,” said Archie, a real grin twitching at his lips again. 

The atmosphere was better in an instant. Back to their comfortable, playful level of banter, with Archie settled in a chair next to Betty and Jughead offering them both a few chips from his sour cream and onion mountain. When the door opened, Betty realized that the music outside had stopped.

“Archies?” Raj, the stage manager, called. “You’re up!”

“Start with Christmas Elf’s Wealth and go into A Love Letter For Gas Stations,” said Archie, shuffling out the door behind them. “If we’ve got time, we can do Into The Hall Of The Capitalism King.”

As they made their way toward the stage, they passed Josie and the Pussycats, trying to condense all their gear into a manageable amount. Their manager was yelling at their beleaguered roadie about something that nobody else seemed to care about all that much. All of the girls in the band — who were perfectly nice, if a frustratingly talented act to follow — waved to The Archies from a distance.

“Break a leg!” Valerie Brown, their keyboard player, yelled. She raised both her hands above her head and waved like she was trying to flag down a plane or some aerial good luck spirit.

“Or any bone you won’t need to use in your everyday life is fine,” echoed the ditzy drummer, Melody Valentine.

For just a moment as they stepped onto the stage, the lights nearly blinded Betty. It was a familiar whiteout with the same spots in her eyes as always, but this time, she wanted them to fade fast enough for her to scour the crowd.

This time, there was someone out in the audience that she actually wanted to see.

As soon as she could look around again, Betty spotted Veronica sitting with Kevin up on the balcony. Her long, manicured nails werea shade of light blue tonight that Betty realized wasn’t all that far off from her own eye color. Veronica winked. If she weren’t up here to do a show, if there weren’t people waiting for her music and bandmates depending on her contribution, Betty could have looked at her forever.

“One-two-three-four!” Jughead shouted, his drumsticks a sharp and grounding rhythm. Her hands found the right frets. Beside her, Archie took a breath and steadied his voice to start singing.

And then the ceiling collapsed.

What happened next felt like something out of a fever dream Betty might have had while drunk in a Best Buy. A man descended from the hole in the roof, hefty laptop in one hand, while computer cables twisted and undulated and worked together to carry him safely down to just above ground. Then he hovered there, wires twisting to anchor his legs in place and giving him the appearance of a terrifying technological tree. People who hadn’t already beat a hasty retreat ran for the door, screaming their lungs out.

“Betty Cooper,” the evil (?) nerd called. “A pleasure to meet you! My name is Dilton Doiley and I’m here to lay waste to your courting arrangements!”

She grabbed the mic from Archie, who was rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

“Hold on, sorry,” Betty said. “I have no idea who you are.”

That gave Dilton pause. He reviewed something on his laptop and looked her over again.

A high heel sailed through the air and hit him in the back of the head. Dilton winced in genuine pain, scowled, turned to find who had thrown it from the audience. His eyes immediately landed on the assailant.

There stood Kevin and Veronica, the only people left on the balcony. Veronica was holding her other shoe high; her face was blazing with fury. Bared teeth and all. It wasn’t the time or the place for Betty to fall a little bit more in love with her, but she did anyway.

“It hasn’t even been a week yet,” Veronica yelled. “God! Don’t you people know the first thing about _timing_?”

Betty glanced at her stunned bandmates, who looked as lost as she did. At least it wasn’t just her, she thought to herself, watching Archie’s fingers fall away from the strings with the dim realization that he probably wasn’t going to get to play anything right now.

In the end, Kevin was the one who voiced the question that only Veronica — and apparently, Dilton — knew the answer to. “Timing for what?”

Electricity crackled and metal scraped on metal as Dilton drew himself up taller on his tower, unintentionally calling Betty’s attention to how short the man himself was. The frown that creased his face behind thick-rimmed glasses spoke to years of frustration with Veronica.

“I wrote letters,” he protested. “Lots of them! I gave her due notice! And you couldn’t even _tell her_?”

When Dilton turned to face Betty again, his back to the balcony, another heel flew towards him almost instantly. It bounced off Dilton’s back and disappeared into the unoccupied, rubble-littered mosh pit below.

But it was Kevin who had thrown this one, his arm still extended when the nerd whipped around to glower. Next to him, Veronica was leaning over the railing, a cigarette having materialized in her hand. She took a drag and watched Betty with an expression that Betty didn’t know how to decipher. (One that she’d like to understand one day, if she could.)

“Explain, right now,” Kevin yelled. “I’m drunk and I don’t like complicated bullshit love triangle plots built on miscommunication when drunk!”

“Or _ever_ ,” muttered Jughead.

“Did you even read my letters?” Dilton asked, voice filled with despair over wasted time that he could’ve found better uses for. Well, better to him — Betty was pretty sure that whatever he did in his free time would seem either crazy or bland to her.

Up on the balcony, Veronica put out her cigarette, stubbing it into a tiny ceramic tray.

“He’s my ex-boyfriend,” she said. “And part of my League of Seven Evil Exes or whatever. He wants to defeat you and win me back, because I’ll _definitely_ date a guy who turned my newest girlfriend into JPEGs of dust clouds.”

Even in the context of a battle for her life, Betty’s heart still skipped a beat at the world girlfriend, at the sign of reciprocation. It skipped another beat — a worse one, a scared one — when she remembered Sabrina. Betty quickly put her other girlfriend out of her mind and refocused on the fight.

“He and I only dated for a week, anyway. The whole thing is stupid,” Veronica finished.

Dilton raised himself even higher to spare his wounded pride. “It’s not stupid!”

So maybe Veronica had a couple skeletons in her closet. Having to fight a definitely-evil nerd or two wasn’t that bad, Betty figured, in the grand scheme of lying and cheating and even her own secrets that she hadn’t dealt with yet. Seeing one of Veronica’s imperfections — a hesitation to put something important on the table right away — so clearly just made her feel a little relieved. It wasn’t only Betty who was flawed.

And on the topic of flaws, as she watched Dilton wave his arms around, yelling, yelling, yelling about honor and a code and someone named Cricket O’Dell, she glimpsed an exposed “AUDIO INTERFERENCE WARNING” sign on his lower left leg’s cables.

She leaned away from the microphone, covering it with a hand before turning to face Archie and Jughead. “What’s the loudest song we have?”

Maybe it was all their years as a close-knit group of friends. Maybe it was their shared performer’s desire to play music on this stage, one way or another. Or maybe Betty really, really wasn’t as subtle as she thought. Whatever the reason, both guys picked up on her plan instantly. They nodded.

Jughead dusted off his drums as Archie took the microphone from her; bass in hand, Betty stepped back, watching Archie flash their practiced hand signals for Willy Wormhole.

“This one goes out to our most loyal fans,” Archie said, his voice echoing in the empty hall. A distracted Dilton glanced back at him. Up from above, Veronica raised an empty glass, watching them closely. “Just a little friendly word of advice for you…”

Both he and Betty leaned in to the same microphone, inhaling and exhaling in the same breath. Betty’s eyes met Veronica’s and she felt a confident warmth spread through her tired bones, grinning so wide that it made her cheeks hurt. Seemingly despite herself, Veronica’s sharp features had softened into a smile, too.

“ _Duck!_ ” Archie and Betty howled in unison.

Shaggy blonde and prim black mops of hair disappeared behind the guard rail as the auditorium was overwhelmed with a sonic wall of sheer noise. When Betty spared a glance back over her shoulder, she saw the Pussycats hauling amps out, Josie’s shouted directions to her friends disappearing in the sound as they plugged in cables and assembled a crude wall of their own tech behind The Archies. 

Valerie gave her a thumbs up over a glittery purple keyboard and Melody began to dance delightedly at her drum set as if the blaring music wasn’t almost making Betty’s eardrums bleed.

From up high, she saw Dilton reel, hands clutched over his ears. Then the Pussycats counted down and — without missing a beat — started playing along with Willy Wormhole as if it was a song they were _more_ than familiar with. She almost couldn’t tell which beat was Jughead’s and which one was Melody’s. Josie even knew the words.

A particularly full-hearted melody from Valerie and Betty’s deep bass line brought Dilton to his knees. Sparks scattered off his crumbling technological nightmare and fizzled out harmlessly in the air, followed by more, and then more. 

Neither band slowed down for a second. The song kept escalating, escalating, building up to a peak that was so violent, they’d stopped playing it in concert much. A light fixture plummeted from the shattered ceiling and exploded into a small fire next to Dilton’s prone form.

And then it _all_ exploded.

Betty staggered back, falling into Jughead’s drum set and sending him to the floor — or maybe he’d fallen already. Everyone had stopped playing, so she didn’t think they were in much better shape than her. The world was white, white, painfully hard to look at and far more disorienting than any stage lights had ever been. Swearing, realizing that she couldn’t hear her own curse through the ringing in her ears, Betty carefully shoved her bass to the side and staggered back to her feet. What felt like an eternity (but was probably only a minute) passed before she could see the arena again.

Where Dilton had been was nothing but rubble and roughly $3.50 in loose change.

“Um,” she said in a voice that sounded very far away. “What?”

Just like that, Betty had won. There was nobody left on the balcony, or at least, nobody peeking out — as she scanned the room with worry mounting in her heart, her hearing started to come back to her. The hard squeak of ill-fitting sneakers on polished wood was Betty’s only warning before Veronica tackled her from the side.

They tumbled to the floor together, Betty protesting and Veronica giggling and both of them with their arms around one another. Melody helped them back to their feet as Kevin pried Jughead out of his tangle of drum parts and Josie compared the damage on her guitar with Archie’s. Everyone was elated, giddy, high off of a shared victory and a mutual closeness their bands hadn’t had before.

Working together really did feel better than letting childish jealousy wrap its twisted fingers around her heart, Betty thought, watching Valerie plant a grateful kiss on that portable purple piano. Maybe they could do gigs _together_.

“I have other exes that are probably evil,” Veronica admitted later as they stood on the curb outside and waited for Archie to bring his half-broken jalopy around. “You may have to fight a few more guys. And I’d assume some girls, too.”

Betty looked over at her.

“Is that OK?” Veronica asked.

The evening sunset made the shining green pigments in Veronica’s eyeshadow glow, glow, glow, so resplendent and beautiful that Betty couldn’t imagine ever turning away from a relationship like this. She wanted to know everything about Veronica — all the personality flaws, bad girlfriends and boyfriends past, _everything_. Standing up on that stage and strumming her heart out, she’d realized that she wanted to wake up next to Veronica every morning more than anything in the world. To learn what she was like with bedhead or when she was stuck in traffic or how she smiled after a good day.

Instead of answering in words, Betty leaned over and kissed Veronica.

And it felt right.


End file.
